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What, exactly, is the purpose of the U.S. Congress? In the second Trump administration, it can be hard to tell. The authority to declare war, traditionally viewed as a crucial legislative power, has become a unclear prerogative of the executive branch in the time since the 9/11 attacks; Trump, in recent months, has claimed even more of that control for his administration, authorizing military actions on vessels in the Caribbean Sea.

The authority over spending appears to be largely been taken away from the legislative branch as well; now, under the leadership of budget chief, the OMB director, a great deal of the ability to appropriate federal funds has also shifted to the executive, with the White House claiming the authority to abort congressionally authorized spending and attempting to redirect the money elsewhere. It’s as if they’re passing any legislation, anyway; almost all legislation must currently be packed into budget reconciliation bills, massive perennial must-spend comprehensive bills that can circumvent the filibuster. But when these fail to be approved – and more and more, they do not – the government simply ceases operations. At least, big parts of the administration do – and it’s uncertain how many citizens are aware. At present, the federal government has been closed all month; there are little indication of it reopening in the near future. But the executive branch keeps on operating smoothly.

And so the question of control of the House and Senate can seem rather moot. Why should Americans care who has a majority in a institution that has mostly abolished itself?

How ‘oppose the president’ messaging may help the state of California’s Prop 50 prevail

And yet Proposition 50, California’s ballot measure on district boundaries that could deliver five additional congressional positions to the Democratic Party if it is embraced by voters in a special election next month, has captured the attention of liberals across the country. Partly, it is a delayed reaction to developments happening elsewhere: Republican-controlled states have for a long time embraced dramatic partisan gerrymandering while big Democratic-controlled such as California, the Empire State and Washington create their district lines via impartial redistricting panels, an asymmetry that has resulted in closely divided House control and a longstanding sense, by the left, that their party is bringing a knife to a gun fight. The California measure is clearly designed as a response to a mid-term redistricting that was recently approved in the Lone Star State, which implemented boundaries that will provide Republicans an additional five seats in the state House representation in the upcoming term; similar boundary changes are in progress in states such as the Show-Me State and Indiana. (Democrats in the Old Dominion are also emulating California’s example in attempting to alter districts.)

The California initiative seems probable to be approved, as Democratic and liberal voters react with fear and frustration to Trump’s autocratic centralization of power and seek ways to restrain his most extreme tendencies. But the proposition is not free from debate. Some opponents warn that the action could backfire, with blue states’ efforts to redistrict setting off a revenge pattern in which red states do even more to design their maps so as to eliminate any possibility of opposition party success. Different critics have questioned the measure on more purely principled democratic bases: a electoral area that is created in such a manner that the result of the election is not in doubt, they argue, is one that cannot be said to be genuinely representative: it implies, necessarily, that the power of opposing views is muted, and that the procedure of deliberation, argument and convincing that is supposed to define a functioning democratic process will be limited only to primary elections, if it happens at all.

It is valuable considering each of these objections on their merits. The first critique, that Prop 50 will spur conservatives to alter their own maps in response, fails as a logical point: it does not make sense to say that the GOP will be compelled to behave in antidemocratic ways by Democrats’ actions when they are already doing so in the absence of those actions. The Republican party, it can be noted, has required no any motivation of revenge to redraw boundaries that guarantee long-term positions for their party: they have been willing to do this for their own benefit, in the total lack of Democratic reciprocation, for years.

The second objection, I think, is more substantive, reflecting not just a strategic disagreement about how to address the Republicans’ anti-democracy shift, but a sort of melancholic desire for a distinct country than the one that the US has turned into. It is accurate that in a better situation – in the world that most Democrats, I think, desire and hope for – the proposition would be unappealing to our values, and not required by our circumstances. It is undesirable to manipulate targeted demographics; it is not good for politicians to choose their constituents, rather than the reverse; it is not good that votes are rendered noncompetitive. That these actions have grown necessary in order to slow the autocratic advance of the president’s control and reduce the amount of suffering he is able to cause is sad; it is a indication of how far we have fallen from something more like a representative government. But they are required. It is only once the battle against Trumpism has been successfully concluded that we can lament what fighting it has transformed us into.

If Congress fails to in reality have legislative, war making or appropriations authority, what is it, precisely, that the proposition’s five new Democratic representatives will be dispatched to Washington to do? One aspect that Congress continues to retains is the authority to compel testimony, and the ability to examine. Even in our time of sclerotic government and congressional atrophy, it has made use of that authority to great effect. In the coming years, if Prop 50 passes and California’s additional Democrats are sworn in, they will become a part of a institution with the authority to probe Trump, to televise their hearings into his conduct and to compel associates of his close advisors to testify. It’s not nothing, and crucially, it’s not anything that any Republican would do.

• Moira Donegan is a news outlet writer